Diet Danger

Grapefruit: perfectly delicious, diet-friendly fruit. The Grapefruit Diet? Gimmicky at best, and in a bizarre case, nearly deadly at worst. Three days into a restrictive version of the diet, a 42-year-old woman in Washington was rushed to the hospital. She had developed a blood clot from the hip to the calf of her left leg while on an hour-and-a-half car ride. Doctors wrote in the medical journal The Lancet that by the time the woman reached the hospital, her leg was purple, she could hardly walk, and her leg was almost amputated. So what's all this got to do with grapefruit? Turns out that the fruit and her birth control pills had a strange reaction: the fruit blocked an enzyme that usually breaks down the Pill's estrogen. Higher estrogen levels, greater risk of blood clots. Another reason to listen to real scientists for diet advice.